Live Wire: A conference call with Franz Ferdinand

PT: I think the record as a whole is more personal and comes across as the personalities of all four of us.

TT: What songs started you out in the recording?

PT: The first track and the last track, Right Action and Goodbye Lovers and Friends, are the first songs that were written and demoed. Alex, you know, played them to the whole band. But Goodbye Lovers and Friends was the last one we finished, because we had recorded multiple versions of it, then we spliced them all together.

TT: I also want to ask you about one of your early arty projects. In 2004, Franz Ferdinand appeared in a much discussed erotic movie called Nine Songs.

PT: Oh God, yeah.

TT: How did that come about?

PT: The director Michael Winterbottom just said he was making this film and wanted to film one of our concerts. That was it. They just brought this film crew there. We never knew it was about this couple that come to the show, and they go to a bunch of other shows, and they have sex. I have not seen the film, but as far as I know, that’s the premise. They go to a lot of gigs and have sex.

I am not a massive fan of Michael Winterbottom’s films, to be honest. Also, the main actor in Nine Songs [Kieran O’Brien] was also [the title character] on a kids TV show when I was growing up, Gruey. I didn’t want to see Gruey’s [bits and pieces], so I’ll probably pass on that one.

TT: How about the new music videos? For the song Evil Eye, the video uses a bunch of B-movie chop socky horror cliches, and the director, Diane Martel, has also done videos for Miley Cyrus and other people in the pop side of the industry. How was it working with her?

PT: We did the Do You Want To video with her on the second record and became friends. There were also some personal problems in the band after the third record, and with her being a close friend of the four of us, she kind of intervened and helped us sort out our problems like men. This time, she offered to do a video specifically for that song. So we sat around and she threw a thousand ideas at us, all these little visual gags that you see in the video. And we said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that. Or, no, I’m not doing that.’ But when we were with Diane, we become very suggestible. That’s how I end up in a bathtub full of vomit, because I’m not doing that for anybody else.